About 80 years ago, as World War II drew to a close, engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush submitted to President Harry S. Truman his report on the future of scientific research in America. Science: the Endless Frontier became the most important document shaping American federal science policy, resulting in the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, new agencies like the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and DARPA, which laid the groundwork for the internet, and a twenty-one-fold increase in R&D spending from 1953 to 2024 (adjusted for inflation).
Yet American science faces major challenges today. Innovations may be getting harder to find. The majority of published research findings are more likely to be false than true, based on mathematical analysis. Even prestigious scientists have committed research misconduct. Burnout and quality-of-life issues for scientists are getting worse. And recent advances in AI and large-language models (LLMs), while unlocking exciting opportunities, are also allowing for the rapid creation of fake but convincing papers.
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On July 21, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, offered a new vision for revitalizing America’s scientific ecosystem: Science: A New Golden Age. (Full disclosure: Kratsios previously served on the board of the Foundation for American Innovation, where I am director of science and innovation.) The report is the result of a March 2025 presidential mandate much like Truman’s: “I am calling on you to blaze a trail to the next frontiers of science,” wrote President Trump.
Kratsios’s report describes four objectives to achieve this revitalization: prioritizing individual scientists, not institutions; funding reforms at scale; mobilizing industry and enterprise; and preparing for the AI revolution. Let's look at the objectives in turn.
First, the United States should focus its support on worthwhile individual scientists, not their often-sclerotic legacy institutions that put their own institutional interests over those of scientific endeavor. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once described how institutions that excel at bringing in money and prestige can lose sight of their true purpose. Science: A New Golden Age shows how many scientific institutions have strayed from the pursuit of excellence in favor of preserving funding streams and garnering cultural prestige through the pursuit of left-wing ideological initiatives. Even so, the report rightly acknowledges that universities remain critical to scientific research.
Second, the report also addresses the tension between a citizen-directed scientific enterprise for public missions and the role of expert self-governance and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Kratsios has suggested that we need to balance mission-alignment with freedom for individual scientists to pursue their own creative genius.
Federal science funding has been remarkably stable in the 76 years since the NSF was founded and the National Institutes of Health expanded into biomedical research: steady support for universities has been delivered mostly through the novel postwar mechanism of grants. What have not held steady are red tape, the scale of funding, and the enterprise itself. The report urges experimenting with new mechanisms for fast, long-term, and unconventional funding: lotteries, golden tickets, and people-not-project grants. It calls for the implementation of metascience units at federal science agencies—offices that would study how science itself gets done—giving agencies a way to learn which mechanisms work best and to adapt as the enterprise accelerates.
Third, the report’s encouragement for mobilizing industry is welcome. Industry-funded research has expanded enormously and is now the largest source of R&D spending in the U.S. In the postwar decades, Bell Laboratories showed how industrial labs can host ambitious science.
Finally, a section heading in the report gives a name to America’s next scientific Golden Age: “The Age of Intelligence.” The report shows that the development and deployment of artificial intelligence within the scientific enterprise is a necessary but not sufficient key to unlocking this Golden Age. The aim is not to automate away scientists but to give them tools to transform their work, as our leading mathematicians have already begun to do.
These are ambitious tasks against a vast federal deficit and proposed agency cuts. Yet the report arrived alongside the administration’s Fiscal Year 2028 R&D priorities. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office has found that new nondefense R&D spending can reduce the federal deficit over a 30-year window.
Kratsios’s report gives reformers a manual for transforming the enterprise and charts the foundations of a new Golden Age, but everyone—policymakers, universities, agencies, philanthropy, and industry—must pull together to direct our scientific enterprise toward truth, beauty, and discovery and away from ideological exercises like DEI statements in hiring.
To be sure, science will need funding from Congress, philanthropy, and industry to be successful. But absent reform, throwing money at existing institutions will only give us more of the same—and that’s not good enough.